Hatfield Memorial Lecture

IOM3

,

25 Oct 2011

The Institute-supported Hatfield Memorial Lecture will this year discuss nuclear reactors. Professor George Smith FRS, Emeritus Professor of Materials at Oxford University, will look at safety issues. The lecture will take place on 6 December at 6.45pm in the Octagon Centre, Western Bank, Sheffield.

With the need for civil nuclear reactors to have a safe operating lifetime of 60 years or more, materials issues need to be brought to the fore. There is a need for improved mechanistic understanding of processes such as irradiation-induced embrittlement and environmentally assisted cracking.

In this lecture, case studies will illustrate the use of atom probe tomography to explore the behaviour of currentgeneration pressure vessel steels, primary cooling circuits and fuel cladding materials. Work on the development of materials for next-generation fission reactors and nuclear fusion power generation will be outlined. Broader policy concerns will also be addressed